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Combustion engine driven compressors are similar to electric motor driven ones, but are more complicated and certainly have plenty of moving parts.
Adsorption/absorption refrigeration systems have fewer moving parts, as they use heat as the main driving force and so don't have compressors. But they still have moving parts like pumps and fans, and they are completely dissimilar in design to mechanical compressor driven refrigeration.

My old 1975-era RV fridge had no moving parts at all, no pump, no fan. Just a propane driven pilot light which switched off & on as it heated the ammonia in a sealed system. The ammonia circulated passively. The fridge had to be kept in a more or less vertical orientation for the circulation to work properly. Too much off level, it wouldn't work. When the RV was rolling down the road, the orientation of the fridge was less important, the constant shifting back & forth of the fridge would allow the refrigerant to circulate quite well. Its main point of breakdown was the pilot light / thermocouple mechanism, kept either getting dirty or corroded, otherwise it was extremely reliable.
The propane supply could be switched off and the fridge could run on "shore power" - 110VAC when the RV was plugged in. The 110VAC was simply used as a heat source, again, no pumps, no fan, electricity was solely used as a heat source.

I took 2 semesters of 1st year college Mandarin last year. Got a virtual B+, but I was just auditing the course. Putting the same effort I expended on learning Mandarin into learning Spanish, I would have been much further along as a Spanish speaker. However, I really enjoy what little I know about Mandarin & that will continue the rest of my life. I now have a window into the cultures of the Middle Kingdom I could have not otherwise gotten.

The first one was for my brother-in-law, who died of ALS. He was very close to one of his nieces, but she was in the Army in Germany, and they didn't consider the relationship close enough for leave. So she watched my webcast via Ustream. The interesting thing is that Ustream stores the webcast, and it has been watched more than 200 times. I suspect most of those views were my sister - and why not? Here is a recording of their family and friends talking about how much they loved the man she lost.
In another case, a friend's husband died of a massive stroke. His wife and kids were in the Midwest, but his mom and the rest of his family was back east, and his mother was too old and ill to travel, so she watched the webcast.

What would keep friends & family of the deceased from doing the same, using their own skills & equipment? A broadband internet connection at the site of the funeral, decent lighting. decent miking, & a few 110VAC outlets would be enough, IIRC.

Funerals aren't for the dead - they're for the living. Try giving the eulogy at your parents' funeral, with your sisters and your uncles and aunts there. You'll "get it.".

I agree about the purpose of funerals. I wrote my mother's obituary, stored her ashes at my home for a couple of days, transported them 500 miles to her town of origin, gave her eulogy at her funeral and actually buried her ashes in the same plot with 2 of her sisters, with my own two hands. A great many people reading this thread will just not "get it", and will never "get it" even after they die. Denial is not only a river in Egypt.

you can dispense with the funeral services almost entirely. There might still be a gathering, but it could be anywhere. There might still be a religious service, but it might not include tens of thousands of dollars worth of embalming and equipment.

Cremation already gives families that option. Crematoriums often have options for viewing the body prior to cremation, probably for an extra charge. The cremated remains can be transported without special permits & methods of storage are up to the custodian of the ashes.

That actually happened to me. I am not an electrician, but I know something about household AC power. One morning some of the power in my house was out, some wasn't. I checked the feed lines going to the main dual breakers - only one line was "hot", the other was dead. I called my city-owned power company, and like the ignoramuses they were, they told me to call an electrician, on my $. I insisted they come out and check their own wiring up to the point where it became MY wiring, since there was very, very little on my end that could have caused such a problem. So they did. Sure enough, one of the 3 crimps connecting the city's wiring to my house had failed & opened one leg of my 220V feed. Their excuse was that the last time the house had its wiring worked on (decades before the problem developed) they had used temporary crimps which were supposed to have been replaced with permanent ones - but never were. so the city replaced all 3 crimps (a few decades late) and immediately restored my power - at no cost to me. Had I followed their suggestion, I would have wasted my money on an electrician, who would have wound up having the same discussion with the city that I did.

"As it turns out, one guy in a pickup truck can cripple a city's ability to function. You don't think that any enemies could muster those kind of resources? Nobody is even trying."
You have no idea is anyone is really trying. None of us do. 30 guys with 30 pickup trucks, 30 hunting rifles shooting armor-piercing bullets (available almost anywhere in the USA), could easily take out transformers over a wide area, and cripple a region's ability to function.